I research, write about innovation, privacy and reputation via my books and articles, and work on it with clients as president of Arcadia, a communications research, design & delivery lab focused on today's most important, cutting-edge issues. I have 30+ years of professional experience working at big ad/PR agencies and at major brands, and I'm a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

The Implicit Politics of SXSW

The technogasm underway in Austin is full of politics this year, only the ones they’re talking about aren’t the ones that should be top of mind for brands.

The annual gathering of technologists and their corporate patrons bore witness to speeches by today’s two most notable fugitives from the law; Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both icons for data freedom, who spoke from self-imposed prisons to warn of a dystopian world of government surveillance that their crimes help combat. It was reported that much of Assange’s audience got bored with his unmoderated spiel, and walked out of the auditorium.

This gave attendees some extra time to fire up their smartphones so retailers could watch what they peruse and buy. Algorithms could analyze every word of their emails. Search engines could memorize the sites they looked for or visited, and then tee-up information predetermined to elicit their responses. Services could geolocate their exact positions (and map their movements), and sell it to marketers. Then, for extra measure, attendees could add descriptive personal info to their social feeds, so companies like insurers, banks, and would-be employers could scrape it for later use.

The implicit politics of SXSW — buzzworthy anti-government screeds aside — are that it’s OK for big businesses and their technologies to watch, track, and use information about every bit of consumers’ lives, both willingly provided and unknowingly revealed. The lengths and depths to which this data will be used are a non-issue. The real threat is government intrusion into our lives, since that’s the precious purview of commercial interests.

It’s a gigantic conspiracy that is so insidious and all-encompassing because its purposes are taken for granted, while its proponents, in many ways, are also its victims.

You see, technology is inherently democratic, just like content is free and crowds are best at vetting and sharing truth. These and other implicit morals of the digerati in attendance at SXSW inform the political assumption that companies possess a right to surveil their customers because those consumers have agreed to it, whether by active op-in or failure to opt-out. So, for instance, when Disney announced earlier this week a $1 billion plan to track the movements of visitors to its theme parks, it prompted no mention of its political implications, probably because the fine print on the back of its tickets will absolve it of any culpability, should such an accusation arise.

The conspiracy is a conspiracy of convenience.

Marketers are active participants in this conspiracy, using the traditional tools of aided-awareness polling to point to an imaginary transaction: Consumers are asked if they’re willing to share personal information of apparently little to no value, in exchange for easier shopping, special deals, even better positions in waiting lines. Many of these trades aren’t overt, but rather buried in the clickable boxes required to get seemingly necessary programs and apps to work. They’re certainly not explained in any real detail or, more to the point of making a point, brands take little responsibility for consumers’ comprehension.

Lots of money and creativity are expended making sure people get the difference between laundry detergents or potato chips. But when it comes to grasping the implications of the data and privacy they are about to give up (or over which they’ve already lost control), brands are all but mum. And technology is agnostic, so no worries there.

Like most politics, the politics are so innate that they’re invisible to the technologists and creative types who either enable it, or benefit from its success. A day or so ago, a friend shared a link to a 50GB BitTorrent download of 10,000 songs from past SXSWs, without noting the fact that free sharing meant promotion…but no money for the artists (which is part of the theological underpinning for digital art theft). Threats to the unfettered freedom of online behavior need to be resisted, whether they come from the strictures of government, biases of culture, or the once-legitimate needs of content creators. It’s 2014, and it’s settled case law.

You’d think there’d be a different vibe coming out of Austin. After all, so many of the attendees are artists. In generations past, they’d be actively rejecting the corporate largesse of the event’s corporate sponsors, let alone challenging what’s now an institutionalized commercial encroachment on consumer privacy. Only now, because of the implicit politics, they either assume they can work the system to their advantage, or somehow work outside of it. The latter assumption is patently false — there is no ‘outside’ to a system that sees and knows all — and the former is tantamount to saying that they’ll achieve their own freedom by helping deny it to others. When Brand X uses a song or movie clip to gather more privacy info on its consumers, the artists’ gain is the audience’s loss.

Our society has replaced Woodstock with a trade show.

I’m not sure that consumers will go along with this deal indefinitely. Ultimately, brands —and the businesses behind them — are accountable for consumer relationships. Nobody likes the revealed instances of government snooping, even if they can explain its necessity (for security), so imagine what’ll happen when the implicit assumptions about commercial surveillance become explicit. What happens if artists band together and decide to fight it? Imagine communities of consumers joining together to demand more ways to duck, avoid, or simply opt-out of being watched, yet not be penalized with lack of access or utility. My goodness, they might even be willing to pay for some of the services they use, and pass up those that aren’t worth anything once their value and cost are transparent. There could be true political mobilization on the issues of privacy and data control.

All it might take would be an Edward Snowden or Julian Assange to bring the issue to light. A Ralph Nader for digital privacy. An evangelist who hasn’t been co-opted by the convenience of going along with the Status Quo.

The dangers exposed on the large conferencing screens at SXSW aren’t the politics that brands need to worry about. It’s the implicit politics that pose the greatest threat to their well-being, along with everyone else’s. Brands would do well to get ahead of this issue, and figure out how to address it.

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